Sequoia Gigantea

".................

This living flowing land

is all there is, forever



We are it

it sings through us-........."

Gary Snyder, from "By Frazier Creek Falls" in "Turtle Island"



This picture was taken in the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite national Park. Below are enlarged details showing people for scale. The building and the people are about 30 feet further from the camera than the tree. The first BRANCH on some of these trees is six feet in diameter.

About these big trees, in the matter of longetivity they are undoubtedly one of the oldest living things on the planet. They range in age from 900 to 2100 years and in not a few cases some attain an age of 3000 years. The age of one tree logged had been determined with close approximate accuracy as 3148 years.

TGIF

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.



Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism."



This sounds familiar. We are SO beyond 1984 and it's "up is down" and "black is white." Are we stuck in a strange loop? Repeating our mistakes until we get it right ala Bill Murry in "Groundhog Day?"



I am indebted to Jon Carroll at the San Francisco Chronicle for this quote and his commentary on it. I recommend him quite highly, also Mark Morford at the same paper. Both are available online, look under columnists (no registration required).



Cliches crowd my mind.



"its later than you think"



"the price of liberty is eternal vigilance"



"hey now, what's that sound,

everybody look what's goin' down"



I like the idea, proposed elsewhere in the blogosphere at Bouphonia, of good news friday. I didn't find any good news, so I'll close with more cliches.



"hope springs eternal"



"its always darkest before the dawn"



dread pirate roberts

Despair

There were so many things I started to write about today. Things that really matter, and shape the world we live in. Even little things that don't matter to a lot of people, but matter to me. I thought I should comment on how the Bush administration has changed its mind about the word "private" for describing the accounts that will undo Social Security. Now the word "private" has been declared a pejorative, and must not be used by the media. (See Talking Points Memo for the best analysis of the current battle.) I thought I should comment on the list of dietary guidelines released by the government today. Oh I could go on and on about trying to eat nine servings of fruits and vegetables everyday, how the vegetable should be the center of the meal, and the protein portion its co-star, but most people won't change their diets. We've had lists like this before. I thought I should write about Richard Pombo, the chairman of the House Resources Committee, who thinks that wilderness designations can only be applied to lands that have been untouched by humans. A rather daunting standard to meet, because it means that even a logging road in a National Forest will disqualify an area from protection. Pombo's philosophy can be summed up this way, if we have already intruded on the lush sanctity of the tall trees, why bother to restore it to its grandeur? I thought I could even add a photo of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest area, so readers could see where the new Wild Sky wilderness area is being proposed. But then, I thought I should write about the devastating news that 31 soldiers died today in Iraq, or how Sy Hersh said that Iran was next on our list for war. But maybe I need to say something about the senate vote today on Condoleeza Rice. There's enough angst in that for me to bury my head and weep. And then of course, there's Alberto Gonzales, our own torture master who will likely be confirmed, as well.

I don't even want to talk about why I find it hard to read Atrios anymore. I see the number of comments can reach over 500 in two hours. The echo chamber is reverberating, reverberating, reverberating. What are we saying to each other? I don't know anymore. But I'm sure it's all very important. I think I'll leave it up to be far better minds than mine to sort it all out.

Sex, Science, and Spring

A friend emailed and said she had read this blog and wondered why it was filled with so much doom and gloom. I didn’t think it was, and when I reread the posts, I still don’t. But here are a few things I read in various online venues today that made me happy—



From William Saletan in Slate:



Sex is easily the biggest physical difference within a species. Men and women, unlike blacks and whites, have different organs and body designs. The inferable difference in genomes between two people of visibly different races is one hundredth of 1 percent. The gap between the sexes vastly exceeds that. A year and a half ago, after completing a study of the Y chromosome, MIT biologist David Page calculated that male and female human genomes differed by 1 percent to 2 percent—"the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee," according to a paraphrase in the New York Times. "We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it," Page said. "But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome."



Wow, there’s just as much genetic difference between men and women as there are between humans and chimpanzees. I swear this makes me giddy.



From the NY Times Op-Ed by Olivia Judson



“HYPOTHESIS: males and females are typically indistinguishable on the basis of their behaviors and intellectual abilities.



This is not true for elephants. Females have big vocabularies and hang out in herds; males tend to live in solitary splendor, and insofar as they speak at all, their conversation appears mostly to consist of elephant for "I'm in the mood, I'm in the mood..."



The hypothesis is not true for zebra finches. Males sing elaborate songs. Females can't sing at all. A zebra finch opera would have to have males in all the singing roles.



And it's not true for green spoon worms. This animal, which lives on the sea floor, has one of the largest known size differences between male and female: the male is 200,000 times smaller. He spends his whole life in her reproductive tract, fertilizing eggs by regurgitating sperm through his mouth. He's so different from his mate that when he was first discovered by science, he was not recognized as being a green spoon worm; instead, he was thought to be a parasite.



Is it ridiculous to suppose that the hypothesis might not be true for humans either?”



It is pure ecstasy to consider the differences between men and women and not assign, ascribe, attribute, nor concoct any socio-psychological meaning to it. Just the raw data of genes that connects us to every living thing.



From the NY Times editorial on why Intelligent Design should NOT be taught in public schools:



“Districts around the country are pondering whether to inject intelligent design into science classes, and the constitutional problems are underscored by practical issues. There is little enough time to discuss mainstream evolution in most schools; the Dover students get two 90-minute classes devoted to the subject. Before installing intelligent design in the already jam-packed science curriculum, school boards and citizens need to be aware that it is not a recognized field of science. There is no body of research to support its claims nor even a real plan to conduct such research. In 2002, more than a decade after the movement began, a pioneer of intelligent design lamented that the movement had many sympathizers but few research workers, no biology texts and no sustained curriculum to offer educators. Another leading expositor told a Christian magazine last year that the field had no theory of biological design to guide research, just "a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions." If evolution is derided as "only a theory," intelligent design needs to be recognized as "not even a theory" or "not yet a theory." It should not be taught or even described as a scientific alternative to one of the crowning theories of modern science.”



Ha ha ha. This just makes my heart sing.



From Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle on how to handle the next four Bush years:



“Know that this is not you. Know that you do not have to kowtow and you do not have to succumb and you do not have to bury your head and merely endure. Know that you have this one humble and luminous choice, always and always and every single day: no matter if it's dark energy or light, low vibration or high, raw intimate self-defined sensual divinity or dumbed-down numbed-out force-fed conservative sanctimony, you can either trust that truth and follow your own hot moral compass, or allow it to be stained and warped and doused in fear and led wide, wide astray. It's not about them. It's about you. Make your choice now. Grip it like a baseball bat.



Then, the good news. No longer will you have to ask how to survive. No longer will you ask how you can possibly endure the next four miserable, homophobic, warmongering, Earth-bashing years without daily weeping and clenching and rending of karmic flesh.



That truth of yours won't just set you free; it will lay you open and feed the universe and allow you to laugh at the mad circus of it all, ultimately morphing that sad resigned news-fatigue nausea back into outrage and ire and healthy intellectual fire. And you will, by default and almost automatically, get your fine ass back in the game.”



Why do these things make me happy? Because as surely as these first green shoots of spring have poked their life-affirming leaves through the winter soil—I am filled with hope that wide-open minds will triumph over narrow-thinking.



Rexroth’s Daughter



Spring in January

Fungi Friday

amanita muscaria



amanita muscaria







coprinus comatus



The red mushroom is also known as fly agaric. It was proposed by the ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson as the soma of ancient India. Nowadays everyone labels it poisonous. DON'T EAT IT!. Info here.



The white (ish) mushroom is also known as Shaggy Mane. That is my footgear, put there for scale. Shaggy manes are edible, delicious and easy to identify. Don't rely on me. Get a good mushroom book. I recommend "All that the Rain Promises and More..." by David Arora. It has an easy to use key (identification method). A more technical but still easy to read book is "The New Savory Wild Mushroom" by Margaret McKenny and Daniel E. Stuntz. Both books have recipes.



Its getting late, so this may be Science Saturday as well.

Class Warfare

one of the lenses through which to view history that i find instructive and informative, if not perfectly nuanced, is that of the tension between the peasantry and the nobility and its often cyclical nature. the peasants struggled to survive despite the oppression of taxes and such quaint practices as the "right of the lord of the manor to the bridenight." the nobles, in their arrogance, tended to squeeze out ever more taxes from the peasants and to treat them with increasing cruelty. when the peasants were sufficiently desperate they took up cudgels and pitchforks, stormed the castle, and killed as many nobles as possible. the nobles in turn sent out their army, comprised mainly of the strongest and most brutal peasants forced and bribed into service, to kill as many peasants as possible. the easy example is the french revolution.



it usually worked out badly if either side scored too decisive a victory. the peasants, though not stupid, may not have learned to organize quickly enough to defend against takeover by a neighboring nobility. the local nobility, lacking a sufficient peasant base, may have been forced to capitulate to a stronger neighbor. either way the peasants were bound to suffer the most. if a rough balance was struck, before the country was too much laid waste, life went on and the nobility may have learned to limit their oppression of the peasants. there have been and are now countries where sufficient of the noble (modern noble=$) class understand the full implications of noblesse oblige for their own lives, both morally and selfishly. the nobility of some countries were slow learners, thus another cycle was acted out, or those countries are gone. do you remember bohemia or dalmatia?



today the tension is played out between the haves and the have-nots, the owners and the renters. in european countries many of the haves are still the inherited nobility. china has a new dynasty, and the communist party leaders are the nobility and the larger population are still both literally peasants and have-nots. in those countries that have survived several of these cycles, mostly europe, the haves seem to have learned that they can maintain their opulent, even decadent, lifestyle if they allow the have-nots to become have-somes. the disparity between the highest paid and lowest paid in the usa is some ten times the disparity in europe. workers in europe routinely get six weeks of vacation, while the standard in the usa is two weeks or less. most industrialized countries have universal health care--not so in the usa.



while we still have a large middle-class in our country, they do seem oblivious to the sizable chunks falling off the bottom of lower-middle into poverty, creating more have-nots. our president was infamously caught on video telling a gathering of supporters "you're my base--the haves and the have-mores." we have seen the largest tax cuts benefit the very rich while we go to war. in response to a major attack on our country the president says "go shopping." we hear the lie that social security is in "crisis." something like 5% of our population owns somewhere over 75% of everything. the rich are so comfortable that they don't care if our government makes an unholy alliance with a radically fundamental christian minority, letting them dictate public morals in return for political support, as long as the rich can get richer. the wealthy can send their daughters to morally lax europe for abortions. how many "upper-crust" young men and women enter the "all volunteer" armed forces? inside walled and gated communities there are private police and fire departments, while outside, more and more cities small and large face budget problems necessitating cuts in police, fire, and public health services. whole states face bankruptcy. on the international front our "king" is depleting our treasury of blood and money to support his insane drive to dominate the ENTIRE PLANET. the smarmy little man, shilling for the oil barons, is spending the rent money, the nest egg, the seed corn, and not just incidentally trashing our good name.



are the peasants desperate enough to take up cudgels and pitchforks? well, not this peasant. not quite yet. i do despair, and i do see the fuzzy outlines of the velvet coup d'etat engineered by the guys in the smoke-filled room; the new, oh so discreet, nobility of the owners of it all, but the bigger population has inertia. the new world order has not yet congealed into reality. "it's a hard rain gonna fall" for sure. i am a pessimist, but i swear i see the current madness fraying around the edges. the stark economic reality of continuing deficit spending and imbalance of trade will hit with bad effect. it will creep in like the tsunami did in places, just a bit higher than most waves at first, then a chunk more, then a double high wave and on and on. how much sacrifice must our military endure? how many VA hospitals will close? we may not quite get, as a whole, what's really happening in iraq in our name, but we will notice when we see more homeless people, when our adjustable mortgages are adjusted up every chance, when we know lots of laid off people, when none of our schools has a library, when the dow jones tanks to 600, when inflation eats up every gain we've made for forty years.



the machinery of our governance is sore tried by rabid people on all sides poisoning the well of public discourse. we do not have to join in that foul endeavor. do not be shy to be honest and open. be aggressively ethical. be insistently civil. the reality-based community has an implacable ally---reality. keep pointing at actual events and economic facts.



i read and enjoy a lot of blogs and comments for information, opinion, humor and ideas. i would recommend and thank two of my favorites bloggers for challenging me to think deeply about our current political and moral situation. please go read cervantes and robert m jeffers .



dread pirate roberts

Not so Sound

Puget Sound





The top picture is from the train heading south out of Tacoma. Train travel is great (highly recommended). The other picture is looking at Port Townsend and the Olympic Mountains from the ferry from Whidbey Island. The ferry is a great ride (Also highly recommended).



We are fortunate to live in a beautiful place, but best not look too closely at the water itself, nor peek underneath the surface. Puget Sound suffers from the same malady that plagues all too many shorelines and waterways. Agricultural runoff, improperly installed and maintained septic systems, inadequate sewage treatment, rain washing car crap and other junk into waterways into lakes, bays, sounds, and oceans. An article in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer gives a short description of the problems and some solutions.



I think the following quote from the article illustrates part of the problem. "Stormwater regulations are getting out of hand," said Tim Harris, a lawyer with the Building Industry Association of Washington. "They're absolutely ridiculous. It's overregulation providing very little positive impact." I guess he never heard of "the tragedy of the commons."



More info here and here here